The minority report was equally positive as to the cause of the trouble in Kansas and the proper remedy. "Repeal the act of 1854, organize Kansas anew as a free Territory and all will be put right." But if Congress was bent on continuing the experiment, then the Territory must be reorganized with proper safeguards against illegal voting. The only alternative was to admit the Territory as a State with its free constitution. The issue could not have been more sharply drawn. Popular sovereignty as applied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act was put upon the defensive. Republican senators made haste to press their advantage. Sumner declared that the true issue was smothered in the majority report, but stood forth as a pillar of fire in the report of the minority. Trumbull forced the attack, while Douglas was absent, without waiting for the printing of the reports. It needed only this apparent discourtesy to bring Douglas into the arena. An unseemly wrangle between the Illinois senators followed, in the course of which Douglas challenged his colleague to resign and stand with him for re-election before the next session of the legislature.[560] Trumbull wisely declined to accept the risk. On the 20th of March, Douglas addressed the Senate in reply to Trumbull.[561] Nothing that he said shed any new light on the controversy. He had not changed his angle of vision. He had only the old arguments with which to combat the assertion that "Kansas had been conquered and a legislature imposed by violence." But the speech differed from the report, just as living speech must differ from the printed page. Every assertion was pointed by his vigorous intonations; every argument was accentuated by his forceful personality. The report was a lawyer's brief; the speech was the flexible utterance of an accomplished debater, bent upon a personal as well as an argumentative victory.